Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes

Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don’t care about them when they meet them, at the gas station, the car wash, the post office even.

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

I like to go where the life is.

I figure that I’m always going to be fine, one way or another, but I do worry about other people who have difficulty moving from one world to the next. It’s the folks who are truly invested in their lives who have the hardest time with change.

I love investigating the natural world, and I find a lot of truths there, truths about survival and beauty – nature continually surprises me (amazing how clever a woodchuck is, amazing how plants roots can break up concrete, amazing how delicious the thimbleberry is!).

We have a shotgun we inherited from my father-in-law, a paranoid Englishman living in Texas. I have a .22 Marlin rifle, similar to the one Annie Oakley had, and my husband has a .357 Magnum pistol. All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.

There were a lot of beautiful, thin people out there driving nice cars. It was a whole different experience being in L.A.

I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America.

I can’t personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.

I’ve worked behind counters serving food, and I’ve lived on the circus train, and I’ve led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I’ve been a key liner for a newspaper, I’ve done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it’s something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.

I love writing about men. To get by in the world you have to know how men think. Not that all guys think alike, but women tend to think about more things at the same time, an overgeneralization, but I find it easier to make my male characters focus than I do my female characters.

I always know exactly where my stories take place, which gives me something certain so I can use my imagination for the other stuff. I worry though, who wants to keep reading stories about Kalamazoo?

Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn’t seem right. I have my mother’s boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything right with the machines and guns.

I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore. I’m very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.